Hi - this is Srinivasan Sampathkumar from Triplicane. I have a passion for Marine Insurance, Cricket and of course Temples especially Thiruvallikkeni.
From Sept 2009, I am posting my thoughts in this blog ; From July 2010, my postings on Temples & Tamil are on my other blog titled "Kairavini Karayinile " (www.tamil.sampspeak.in)
Request you to keep providing your feedback which will help me improve and present better.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

The final preparations are being made to Britain's sole aircraft
carrier before it sets sail on its last voyage. It is a ship whose service began when it was
rushed in to service for the Falklands War and went on to sail 900,000 miles
around the world on deployments. The ship was involved in the Bosnian, Iraq and
Sierra Leone conflicts and also helped to evacuate Brits during the Lebanon war
in 2006.

The life span of such ships is roughly 25 to 30 years ! –
perhaps when there was no shortage of material, and the ships could be
carefully and leisurely built, it was not as worthwhile breaking up a wooden ship.
She was generally taken to some quiet spot and left to fall to pieces with the
minimum of trouble to her owners.

The sight of a very large vessel floating on water,
carrying goods from one place to another offers imagination beyond dreams. Man
has conquered the ocean sailing across with the aid of ships and boats which
developed alongside mankind. Vessels have borne the key in history’s greatest
explorations. The cargo - from slaves to modern day containers, dry and wet,
live, frozen and refrigerated, big machineries, bulk cargo, liquid cargo – the
variety is endless. But just as most things have a shelf life, ships also have
a limited span of life. Depending upon the type of vessel and nature of goods
carried, generally after 25-30 years ships are at the end of their sailing
life. These vessels who have outlived its existence are sold and dismantled to
recover the valuable steel. A very major % of the vessel consists of steel
which can be rerolled besides valuable machinery such as generators, marine
engines etc., There are various other miscellaneous material as well.

They are taken to on a funeral voyage to the junk-yard –
with high tide, they are simply intentionally run aground, as closer to the
shore as possible, then cruelly cut into pieces manually, pulled a bit more,
and eventually even the keel vanishes !!

Now it is
the turn of ‘HMS Illustrious’, which served in the Falklands War, the Gulf War
and Bosnia, to be scrapped on Wednesday. It will leave its base at Portsmouth
and head to Turkey where it has been sold for £2million. Daily Mail reports
that the last of the Invincible-class aircraft carriers, which could be armed
with Harrier jets and attack helicopters, was retired in 2014 after entering
service in 1982. The ship's final years have been controversial after the
Ministry of Defence declined plans to preserve her as a naval museum. A last
ditch attempt to save her from scrap was refused by naval bosses despite
£3million being offered.

HMS
Illustrious will make way for for two new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, the
first of which will be commissioned for military operations in 2020. The MoD
expects the carrier to leave Portsmouth for Leyal Ship Recycling and
Dismantling company in Aliaga, Turkey, on Wednesday depending on weather
conditions. It is the same yard which scrapped her sister ships Ark Royal and
Invincible. HMS Ark Royal was scrapped for £2.9 million in 2013 and HMS
Invincible fetched around £2 million in 2011.

It is not
alone nor the first ship. Five other
Navy ships have borne the name Illustrious. The first won battle honours
alongside Horatio Nelson’s gunship to secure victory over the French in the
1795 battle of Genoa. The current Illustrious was built by Swan Hunter
shipyards, Tyne and Wear, and commissioned ahead of schedule in 1982 to allow
to serve in the Falklands War. In 1986 she suffered a catastrophic gearbox
failure and was swept by a major fire – almost prompting a call to abandon ship
– that put her out of action for several months of repairs. She has sailed
898,893 miles, equivalent to 36 times around the equator. She was also involved
in efforts to distribute relief in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines
in 2013.

Veterans who
sailed on Illustrious viewed her demise as sad but inevitable. Speaking earlier
this year, David Rogers, vice chairman of the HMS Illustrious Association,
said: ‘We’re all very sad it’s come to this obviously, but I think it was an
inevitability. ‘The ship was conditioned in 1982. She was probably only
designed to last 20 years and she did another 12 years after that.' The ship,
nicknamed ‘Lusty’, has been moored in Portsmouth since she was decommissioned
in a moving ceremony in the city on August 28, 2014.

I had always
thought that only ships had funeral voyage – it appears that ship-breaking
yards too are headed for swan song. The Indian
town of Alang, which was considered one of the biggest ship recycling centre,
where workers with blow torches cut segments of steel stripped from the rusting
hull of a towering cargo ship – are hit reportedly by a flood of cheap Chinese steel and new
European Union environmental rules – is the business dying is the Q ? as the
buzzing town is slowly losing its prominence. The plunging steel prices has
contributed a lot to this.

The Marine Hull Tariff provided ways of covering these ‘
dying ships ‘ under two different sections. Sec V of the erstwhile Marine Hull
Tariff provided for coverage of funeral voyages from a place in a Port to the
breakup yard or vessels lying at sheltered places awaiting break up. This was
more of transit insurance and would cease upon beaching or starting up of
breaking operations. Another Section provided for Ship breaking insurance –
insurance of vessels in the course of being broken up. Here the Sum insured was
to be Full purchase price + customs duty + port charges + any other government
levy. The period was not on voyage basis but was to be reckoned in period of
full months, arrived at the basis of actual LDT of the vessel. The policy
though issued in Hull Department was more or less Fire Policy ‘C’ cover
providing coverage against Fire, Lightning, Explosion / Implosion, Impact
damage, Aircraft damage, Riot, strike, malicious damage and additional cover
against Earthquake, STFI perils etc.,